﻿1861.] 



BREW HASTINGS SAND. 



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Wadhurst Clay between them. Tilgate Forest, which he speaks of as 

 the great locality for the fossiliferous gritstone of his " Tilgate Beds," 

 is upon the uppermost sand of all, even if we take the name to mean, 

 as indeed it does, a greater space than is so marked on the Ordnance 

 map ; and the neighbouring forest, St. Leonards, is on the same 

 strata, except that some of the valleys may just reach down to the 

 Grinstead Clay. I am told that most of the fossils he collected came 

 from near Cuckfield ; and Mr. Hay of the Geological Survey, who has 

 been engaged upon that part of the country, informs me that they 

 were got from two distinct beds — one of them the Grinstead Clay, 

 the other much higher up in the series. 



The sands which he named from the village of "Worth, near here, 

 and placed next below the " Tilgate Beds," belong to what I have 

 called " Lower Tunbridge Wells Sand ; " while the beds about 

 Hastings, which were called " Tilgate " and " Worth " by Dr. Man- 

 tell, are much lower down, and do not come to the surface within 

 some miles of these places. This misconception (which could hardly 

 have been avoided without mapping the country step by step between 

 the two parts, on account of there being no important break in the 

 series, and almost no lithological difference between the several sands 

 and clays) renders it, I think, necessary to disuse the names of " Til- 

 gate" and "Worth" Beds; and with them must go that of " Horsted," 

 taken from quite another part, and perhaps accurate in itself; since 

 these, even if they were applicable to this particular neighbourhood, 

 could not be used for the beds further east without leading to great 

 mistakes. I will now shortly say why I adopted the names that 

 I have been using. 



2. Reasons for using the Names now proposed. — Taking the eastern 

 part first : about Tunbridge Wells the upper sands occupy a great 

 space ; they form nearly all the hills near ; and their top bed makes 

 those conspicuous rocks that I have spoken of. I think, therefore, 

 their name is well taken from that place. The clay beneath them 

 is chiefly found in the valleys about there; but near the large 

 village of Wadhurst, about seven miles to the south-south-east, 

 it spreads over some tolerably high ground, which is indented by 

 a series of valleys that expose a great thickness of it, and at last 

 reach down to the sands below; and its position with regard to 

 these can also be well seen in the cuttings at the ends of the Wad- 

 hurst Tunnel. I have on these accounts thought it well to take the 

 name of Wadhurst Clay for the second stratum. The lower sands 

 make very high ground, are spread over a large area, and show 

 a very great thickness on Ashdown Forest, which is the central 

 part of all the Hastings Sand country : no name, I think, can 

 be better for these than Ashdown Sands. The bed of clay that 

 appears in the Tunbridge Wells Sand, and thickens to 50 ft. to 

 the westward, may well be called Grinstead Clay, from its oc- 

 curring on the north side of the town of East Grinstead, and 

 making as large a spread near there as anywhere else, and from 

 its relation to the lower beds being well seen in that neighbour - 



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